Chosen for His Desert Throne

by Caitlin Crews

  “A king romancing a captive can really only occur within a certain window,” Anya agreed merrily. “Lest we all forget ourselves and start fretting about upsetting power dynamics.”

  “No one who has met you, Doctor,” Tarek murmured then, “would have the slightest doubt where the power lay.”

  And though Ahmed looked at her as if that was meant to be an insult, Anya knew it wasn’t.

  Because when they weren’t discussing media campaigns, wedding arrangements, or thorny issues of which family members to invite—what with her father being her father, and a number of Tarek’s relatives being in jail for attempting to kill him—they were exploring that fire that only seemed to blaze hotter between them.

  Tarek, it turned out, hid a sensualist of the highest order beneath his stern exterior.

  “You are always hungry,” he mused one night as Anya happily polished off yet another feast. They’d taken to eating in one of the private rooms in her apartments, the two of them sitting cross-legged on the floor where it was far easier to reach for each other when a different sort of hunger took control.

  She paused in the act of pressing her linen napkin to her lips, waiting for a comment like that to turn dark. For Tarek to make her feel bad the way her father always had, with snide little remarks like knives.

  But instead, he smiled. “I take pleasure in sating each and every one of your hunger pangs.”

  And he made good on that at once, tugging the napkin from her fingers and laying her out flat before him on the scattered pillows. He drew the hem of the long, lustrous skirt she wore up the length of her legs. Then he lifted her hips and settled his mouth at her core, licking his way into her molten heat.

  Only when he had her bucking against him, shattering and sobbing out his name, did Tarek sit back again. Then sedately returned to his dinner, merely lifting an arrogant brow when she cursed him weakly, lying there amongst the pillows in complete disarray.

  “I do not wait for my dessert,” he told her, as if he was discussing matters of state. “If I wish to indulge myself, I do so immediately.”

  “As you wish, Your Majesty,” she panted.

  It took Anya a full week to face up to the reality of what awaited her on her mobile, much less the repeated requests for appointments with the American embassy. Not to mention the press releases—more a press junket, Ahmed informed her solemnly—that she’d promised Tarek.

  A week to face her new reality and another week to decide that she was well enough prepared to handle it. Or if not prepared, not likely to suffer irreparable harm when subjecting herself to reporters and their intrusive questions.

  She did the biggest interviews first, sitting in a room of the palace that seemed like an anachronism. It was tucked away next to an ancient courtyard that a small plaque announced had existed in one form or another even before the palace had been fully built. Truly medieval, yet it invited any who entered to breathe deep and forget about the passage of time.

  But inside the media room, it was very clear what century Anya was in. It was all monitors and lights, cameras and green screens. The palace’s senior press secretary ushered her through the roster of engagements, where all Anya had to do was tell her story.

  And more critically, her reasons for remaining in Alzalam now she’d been freed.

  “It’s hard to imagine what would keep you there,” said one anchorwoman. She wrinkled her brow as if in concern—or tried. “Surely most people in your position would try to get home as quickly as possible.”

  “I don’t know that many people in my position,” Anya replied. She reminded herself to smile, because if she didn’t, people asked why she was so mad. “Captured, held, then released into a royal palace. Maybe I think that having spent so much time in the kingdom, it might be nice to explore it a little.”

  And then, on the heels of a morning filled with interviews from all over the world, she marched herself back to her rooms, dug her phone out of her bag, and forced herself to deal with all of her messages and voice mails.

  It took hours. But when she was done, she felt both more emotional than she’d anticipated, and less panicky. A good number of the voice mail messages were from an array of journalists, some of whom she’d already spoken to. A few friends had called over the past eight months, claiming they only wanted to hear her voice and letting her know they’d been thinking of her during her ordeal. She took a surprising amount of pleasure in discovering that a bulk of her email was, as always, online catalogs she couldn’t remember shopping from in the first place.

  It made her feel as if, no matter what, life went on.

  Better still, Anya felt somewhat better about the fact she still hadn’t called her father, because he had neither written nor called her. Not once in all the time she’d been held in the dungeon. And, of course, not before that either, because he hadn’t approved of her wasting her time in an aid organization when she could do something of much greater status and import.

  Maybe it told her something about herself—or him—that she felt a bit triumphant when she finally dialed the number of the house she’d grown up in. She knew the number by heart, still, even though the house and the number attached to it hadn’t been hers in a long while. Since long before she’d left it, in fact.

  She stood in her elegant suite, looking out the window as yet another desert sky stretched out before her. Impossibly blue to the horizon and beyond. Looking out at so much sky, so much sand, made her feel as if she was just as expansive. As if, should she gather up enough courage, she might run through these windows, out to her terrace, and launch herself straight into the wind. Then fly.

  It made her heart ache in a good way.

  Anya had never felt that way in the excruciatingly tidy Victorian house on a Seattle hill where her father still lived. More care had been put into the gardens than her feelings. She had grown up guilty. Because she barely recalled her own mother. Because she was forever disturbing her father. Because she didn’t usually like the women he married and presented to her as so much furniture. Because they mostly didn’t care for her, either—and as the window between her age and the current stepmother’s age narrowed, she felt even guiltier at how relieved she was to stop pretending.

  She had left for college and had never returned for more than a brief visit over the holidays. She would have said that she barely remembered the place that her father’s cleaners kept so pristine that it was sometimes hard to believe people actually lived there. Even when she’d been one of them.

  But she could see it all too clearly, now.

  As if all this time away forced her to look at it face on, at last. Not the house itself, but the fact it had never been a home.

  The dungeon beneath this palace, hewn of cold, hard stone, had been cozier. Happier, even. She had catapulted herself out of her father’s house as quickly as she could. The urgency to get it behind her—the kind of urgency the anchorwoman thought Anya should feel about Alzalam—had guided her every move after she’d graduated high school. But it wasn’t as if she’d ever made herself a home elsewhere.

  She’d been moving from place to place ever since, concentrating on school, then her job, then how much she hated her job. She’d never settled anywhere, she’d only endured wherever she’d found herself.

  Until the dungeon had settled on her.

  First she’d despaired, as anyone would. Then she’d tried to make someone tell her how long she could expect to be left there. But after the despair and the bargaining, there was only time.

  When she’d told Tarek that prison had been a kind of holiday, she’d meant it. Now she had the unsettling realization that it had also felt a whole lot more like a home than any other place she’d ever lived. No expectations. No demands.

  Just time.

  What was Anya supposed to do with that?

  “Oh,” came the breathy voice of her latest s
tepmother when she picked up the phone. For a moment, Anya couldn’t remember her name. Or more precisely, she remembered a name, but wasn’t sure it was the right one. It had been eight months, after all. “Anya. My goodness. You’ve been all over the news.”

  Charisma, Anya thought then, recognizing her voice. That was this stepmother’s name. It was, of course, a deeply ironic name for a creature with all the natural charisma of a signpost. But Charisma was young. Anya’s exact age, if she was remembering right, which said all kinds of things about Dr. Preston Turner that Anya preferred not to think about too closely.

  Charisma was not smart, according to Anya’s father. He liked to say this in Charisma’s hearing, and she always proved his hypothesis to his satisfaction by giggling as if that was an endearment. Charisma was blonde in that silky way that seemed to require endless flipping of the straw-colored mass of it over one shoulder, then the other. Her hobbies involved numerous appointments at beauty salons and sitting by the pool in a microscopic bikini.

  Charisma also managed to make it sound as if Anya had gone on the news in a deliberate attempt to provoke her father. As if she was indulging in attention-seeking behavior by telling her story.

  Anya didn’t have the heart to tell this woman that she’d given up on attempting to get Preston Turner’s attention a long time ago. Or that she should do the same.

  “I would prefer not to be on the news,” Anya said, proud of how steady she kept her voice. With a hint of self-deprecation, even. “But apparently you become a person of interest when you’re snatched up in a foreign country, thrown into prison, and then disappear for eight months. I don’t see the appeal myself.”

  Charisma made a breathy, sighing sort of sound. “Your father’s at the hospital,” she said. “Do you want me to tell him that you called? He’s very upset.”

  “He’s been worried about me?” Anya asked, in complete disbelief.

  “There have been a lot of questions,” Charisma hedged. “And you know how your father is. When he’s at the country club he really doesn’t like to be approached or recognized. So.”

  “So,” Anya echoed. She did not point out that the entire purpose of her father’s snooty country club was to be recognized. What would be the point? “What I think you’re telling me, Charisma, is that my imprisonment was an inconvenience.”

  “It was just all those questions,” her stepmother said airily. “He would have appreciated it if you’d given him a little warning, maybe.”

  Anya’s good intentions deserted her. “Funnily enough, they didn’t offer me the opportunity to make a lot of phone calls,” she said, and her voice was not even. It was inarguably sharp. “I was thrown in a dungeon. And then kept there, without any contact with the outside world, for the better part of the year.”

  “Well, I’m not going to tell him that.” Charisma laughed. “You know how he gets. You can tell him that if you want.”

  “I’ll go ahead and do that,” Anya said, already furious at herself for showing emotion. When she knew Charisma would report it back to her father and it would only give him more ammunition to disdain her. “The next time he calls.”

  Which would be never.

  After she ended the call she stayed where she was, standing still in the bright glare of the desert sun, trying to make sense of all the competing feelings that stormed around inside her.

  She could feel that sharp pain in her chest, that knotted thing pulling tight again. Anya rubbed at it with the heel of her hand, then wheeled around, heading toward that bright, happy room Tarek had showed her that first day. She liked how dizzy the light made her, still. She liked that if it became too much, she could go out and dunk herself in that infinity pool. It soothed her to float there, folding her arms over the lip of it while she gazed out across the city to the desert, always waiting beyond.

  Before now, Anya had always considered herself an ocean sort of person. She’d always love the sea, its immensity and pull. She’d grown up in a city surrounded by water, and had imagined she would always live where she could see it, or access it, because it was what she knew. But she hadn’t.

  And something about the desert stirred her, deep inside. It was like the ocean inside out. It was a reminder, always, that no matter what was happening to her, something far greater and more powerful than petty human concerns stood just there. Watching. Waiting. And perfectly capable of wiping it all away.

  She supposed other people might not find that comforting.

  But then, when had Anya ever been like other people? If she was anything like other people, she might have remained a doctor in the emergency room of her busy hospital in Houston, Texas. She might have felt called to medicine like so many of her fellow doctors. Or even called to money and prestige, like her father.

  Instead, she found as the days passed that becoming a queen gave her far more opportunities to truly help people. Without having to run triage, check vitals, or desperately operate a crash cart.

  Even thinking about those things made her blood pressure rise.

  She sat down with her own aides, who showed up one day at Tarek’s order. They discussed different sorts of charity work. Initiatives Anya could undertake. Both the traditional province of Alzalam queens, and new ideas about the sorts of things she, as the most untraditional Queen in the kingdom’s long history, could attempt.

  A month after Tarek had appeared at the door of her cell, they announced their engagement.

  But they did it in the traditional Alzalam fashion.

  Meaning, the announcement was made and the nation launched itself into a week-long celebration that would culminate in the wedding itself.

  “Your people do not waste any time,” Anya said, standing out on a balcony Tarek had told her was built for precisely this purpose. The King and his chosen bride together, waving at the cheering crowd gathered below. “What’s the rush? Are you afraid the bride will change her mind?”

  “Historically yes.” He shot her a narrow look, laced with that amusement she had come to crave. Because she knew it was only hers. “Many brides were kidnapped from an enemy tribe, and it was always best not to leave too much time between taking her and claiming her, in case the warriors from her tribe came to collect her.”

  “Romantic,” Anya murmured. “Practically to Western levels, really.”

  She was rewarded for that with the bark of his laughter.

  And she was starting to get used to how deeply she craved such things. His touch. His laughter. Him.

  Not that she dared say such things to Tarek.

  It wouldn’t do to throw too much emotion into their very practical arrangement. She knew that. And no matter that she found it harder and harder to pretend her feelings weren’t involved.

  Anya sobbed out his name regularly, but kept her feelings to herself.

  Just as she decided it was best not to tell this man of stone that sometimes, her own panic dropped her to the floor. Because that might not only involve emotions—Tarek’s response to such a weakness might spark an attack.

  She had spent hours in fittings over the past month, as packs of the kingdom’s finest seamstresses descended upon her, determined to make sure that everything she wore—whether traditional or Western, depending on which day of the wedding week it was—reflected the glory of the King.

  “And accents your own beauty of course, my lady,” the head seamstress had murmured at one point, after there had been quite a lot of carrying on about Tarek and the honor due him from the women assembled in the room.

  With more than a few speculative looks thrown her way, not all of them as friendly as they could have been.

  But she understood.

  “Of course,” Anya had replied. “But I must only be an accent. It is the King who must shine.”

  That had changed the mood in the room. Considerably.

  And it was not until later
that Anya—who would once have ripped off heads if anyone had suggested she was an accent to a man—realized that somehow...she meant that.

  The realization hit her like a blow as she stood in her glorious shower, and when her heart kicked in, she froze. She expected the panic to rush at her, to take her to the shower floor. She expected to sit there, naked and wet and miserable, until it finished with her.

  But the panic didn’t come.

  No nausea, no hyperventilating, no worries that she might aspirate her own saliva and choke while unable to help herself.

  The hot water rained down upon her. Anya pressed the heel of her hand into that tightness in her solar plexus, hard.

  But still, though she could feel that she was agitated, there was no panic.

  “Because I chose this,” she whispered out loud. “I chose him.”

  It was hardly a thread of sound, her voice. She could barely hear herself over the sound of the water.

  But it rang in her, loud and true, and kept ringing long after she left the shower and dried herself off.

  The night they announced their engagement, Tarek did not eat dinner with her the way he’d been doing, too caught up was he in matters of state. Anya ate alone, enjoying her solitude now that it was not enforced. She read a book. She caught up with her far-flung friends, many of whom could not make it to this remote kingdom on such short notice, no matter how they wished they could. She let herself...be part of the world again.

  After she ate, she sat outside. She found she couldn’t get enough of the desert evenings. The sunsets were spectacular, a riot of colors that never failed to make her catch her breath. And even in the dark, she could feel the desert itself, stretching on and on in all directions, almost as if it called to her. She wrapped herself up in a blanket when she grew cold and stayed tucked up under the heaters, watching the magical old city bloom as the lights came on. Her aides had taken her on a guided tour of the narrow streets, the ancient buildings stacked high, and the more she saw of it, the more she loved it.